Altmetrics sourced from social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and ResearchGate have been studied a lot to date. WeChat (微信), China’s largest social network, is different from the above-mentioned tools in many aspects, including the technological functionalities, user groups, languages used, among others—and in the fact that it is relatively unstudied among scientometrics researchers.

With the growing number and internationalization of users, WeChat has become an important platform for scholarly communication, offering potential for big data insights to map and evaluate the communication of science in China. In this post, I describe the work that I and my colleagues have done to date to better understand how WeChat’s design and other factors influence how academic research is shared, which in turn can affect the volume and nature of WeChat-sourced altmetrics.

What is WeChat and How is it Used to Communicate?

WeChat was launched by Tencent in January 2011. According to statistics at the beginning of 2018, the number of monthly active users of WeChat has reached over one billion after seven years of growth. WeChat is used by many to chat and share content with friends (among many, many other kinds of uses), the private nature of which can make it difficult to track discussions around research. But there are other WeChat features that can be used to share and discuss research, which is what I’ll talk about in this post.

WeChat Official Accounts (WOA)—also called “Gong Zhong Hao” (公众号) or “Public Accounts”—started as a WeChat service in August 2012. WeChat Official Accounts are content producers across all fields in life. The basic features of the WOA platform include broadcast messaging, auto-reply, menu editor, follower management, content management, direct messaging, analytics, and user surveys.

In our research project, we focus on the scholarly communication happening on academic WOAs, among which the dissemination of scientific articles is one of the most important subjects. Academic WOAs disseminate scholarly articles in blog-like posts with their translations to Chinese, interpretations, and/or even commentaries of the articles. By studying scholarly WOAs’ sharing of academic articles and the behavior of their readers, we will be able to better understand the reach and impact of scholarly articles on WeChat, which is currently untraceable due to various reasons.

Studying WeChat as an Altmetrics Source

In our study, we explore the barriers of tracking WeChat as an altmetric source, including technical barriers (based on the infrastructure and affordances), language barriers (mainly between English and Chinese), cultural barriers (about commenting and sharing behavior of users), and policy barriers (e.g., the content management of “external links”, see more discussion below). In this blog post, I will talk about some preliminary findings in our exploration, specifically about the different kinds of academic WOAs, how WeChat post links’ design can impact how they are shared, and the unique role that academic WOAs play in communicating research to broader audiences. More results and discussion will follow in our paper as our project proceeds.

Heterogeneous Types of Academic WOAs

According to the WeChat website, there are currently two categories of WOAs: “subscription accounts”(订阅号), and “service accounts”(服务号), created for different purposes. Individuals can only register for a subscription account; businesses can have the option to run a service account after a series of verification procedures. However, the major differences of these two types of accounts lie in the quotas of messages they can send each month and the features they are granted for interactions with users (for instance, the permission to insert links in their posts, ability to customize menus, and support for payment, etc.). In the past several years, the categories of WOAs, as well as the diverse functions and permissions they are granted, have changed intermittently and is still changing.

Academic WOAs can span a wide range of disciplines, including biomedical & health sciences, life & earth sciences, physical sciences & engineering, mathematics & computer science, as well as the social sciences and humanities. WOAs are significantly different from each other in the kinds of content they share, in addition to the different functions and permissions they have based on whether they are a subscription or service account.

The content and professionalism of posts also vary. On the one hand, an academic WOA can be run by individual enthusiasts of a specific scientific discipline with a small number of posts (in this sense, more like an academic personal blog); on the other side of the spectrum, an academic WOA can be operated by a large team, consisting of not only professionals in academic sectors (scholars, publishers, and science communicators) but also other professionals (translators, social media specialist, marketing personnel, and technical support, etc.) In the latter case, WOA owners might additionally have their own official websites and mobile applications to communicate with readers; they might provide additional services such as conference connections, communications of recent technologies, research trend discussions, social and collaboration features, business opportunities, and so on. Examples of the larger academic WOAs in our investigation list include but are not limited to 科研圈, 壹学者, X-MOL, 奇点网, 机器之心, among others. For some of them, the WOA serves as an extension of the means of marketing and communicating their other services.

All in all, the various types, permissions, and functionalities of the academic WOAs have made it more complex to collect data that fit within the scope of altmetrics.

“External Links” in the WeChat Ecosystem

WeChat Official Accounts reside in the ecosystem of WeChat and follow the rules and regulations of WeChat. WeChat is known to block certain types of URLs from certain sources containing certain content.

“External links” and “internal links” are treated very differently in the WeChat ecosystem. Internal links link to content posted by WOAs, while all the other content can only be linked by “external links”.

The majority of WOAs cannot embed external in-text links, which makes it more difficult for these WOAs to share links to research. Currently, the exceptions are: 1) “service accounts” that have both been verified by WeChat and have the “WeChat Payment” functionality activated; these accounts are granted the ability to insert both internal and external links in their posts, and 2) “subscription accounts” that have the “Copyright Protection” functionality activated are granted permission to insert internal links in their posts. However, the accounts that meet these criteria, especially the first one, are rare.

As a result, the most common way to provide an external link in WeChat is probably to use the “Read More” option at the bottom of the post (see Figure, below).

However, there are two major issues with the use of the “Read More” button. Firstly, only one link can be inserted as the maximum in a single WeChat post. This can be a problem when there are two or more sources that the content creators would like to cite, which is not in rare cases especially in academic posts.

Secondly, the “Read More” button can only be located at the end of the post. Having to click on it at the end of the post can certainly interrupt the flow of reading and navigation. Worse still, sometimes the button can be completely overlooked. According to our interviews with academics, the reason why they do not always click on the “Read More” option is that they simply do not reach that far.

The following two figures show an example of the end of an academic WOA post. This is an article in Chinese, authored by Jie Bai at Digital Science and Dr. Xianwen Wang at Dalian University of Technology, introducing and summarizing the “2018 Altmetric Top 100”. It is posted by the WOA of Lin Mo (林墨), a non-profit academic WOA run by a group of information scientists across multiple universities in China.

In the figure above on the left, we see the display of the end of an article on a regular browser; on the right, we see the same thing displayed on the WeChat in-app browser on a cell phone. For reference, the main text of the article ends just above the top of what can be seen in the Figure; the “Read More” button is marked in the two red boxes.

As can be seen (in the left figure), on a regular web browser, the “Read More” button is separated from the main article by an advertisement of a book, a paragraph of “Call for Papers”, one QR code of the Lin Mo WOA and another of the Lin Mo communication group.

On the cellphone in-app browser (as is shown in the right figure), the “Read More” button is additionally separated by the logo and slogan of the WOA, the WeChat Payment button, as well as statistics of readership and “likes”.

In both instances, the distance between the end of the article and the “Read More” button is a little over two screens away. Additionally, on the cellphone, below the “Read More” button there are other advertisements and a comments section, both of which make the “Read More” button even more difficult to find.

In addition to where the external links are inserted in the posts, rules about how and where external links are opened can also affect one’s ability to track URLs shared in academic WOA posts. For some types of external links, users are asked to open the external link in another browser instead of the WeChat in-app browser. In these cases, the users need to copy the link, open another browser on their phones, and then paste the link into the browser to be able to view the content. These links in a sense become “dummy links”—links that will never be followed because it’s too fussy to do so.

WeChat’s Role in the Two-Step Flow of Communication from Opinion Leaders to the Public

Given the lack of academic social media platforms like Mendeley and ResearchGate in China, academic WOAs help to form and engage otherwise loosely-coupled academic online communities. A two-step flow of communication (Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955; Katz, 1957)—whereby a message is interpreted and rebroadcast through an “opinion leader” to a much broader public—is observed to overcome the language barrier in the communication of academic articles on WOAs. Here, the translation or summarization work (mainly from English to Chinese) of WOAs shapes their role resembling the “opinion leaders” in the Two-step Flow of Communication model.

Currently, altmetrics research tracks and analyzes the mentions of research, usually academic articles, to look at their reach or potential impact. In current altmetrics research, the two-step flow of communication in the impact network is underexplored. For instance, an influential scientist mentioning an article on Twitter probably creates a larger impact than a random Twitter user posting the same article; but in both cases, they are analyzed and interpreted as “one Twitter mention”.

Similarly, one mention of an academic article in a WOA post does not tell the full story of the impact of that work. The readership, likes, and comments of the WOA post can provide valuable additional insights into the reach and potential impact of the article mentioned in this WOA post. Based on our interpretation of the Two-step Flow of Communication Model as it relates to WeChat, my colleagues and I would recommend that any consideration of WeChat-sourced altmetrics includes not only tracking mentions of research in posts (i.e. dissemination by opinion leaders) but also broader readership and engagement metrics (i.e. the influence that the research has had more broadly). With WeChat data aggregators (e.g., Qingbo, which provide some partially open statistics of certain WOAs), it would be possible to integrate these data into the measurement of social reach and impact of academic articles on WeChat.

In Summary

Communication on WeChat is different from any of the other commonly used social media tools in the western world. Nevertheless, WeChat’s increasing user base has made it an important and powerful tool for online communication, and particularly, mobile communication. In the past years, WeChat has gone through rapid growth and transitions in many aspects. Rooted in a different legal and regulatory environment, facing diverse cultural and language barriers, academic WOAs need to be further studied, particularly in terms of openness, in order to better understand its role in scholarly communication mechanisms and thus the meanings of WeChat-based altmetrics.

Shenmeng will present some of the preliminary findings at iConference2019this April in Washington D.C. To follow Shenmeng’s research into WeChat and altmetrics, please check her website for following publications.

]]>https://www.altmetric.com/blog/a-sneak-peek-at-scholarly-communication-on-wechat-official-accounts/feed/0Where to meet us during the first 6 months of 2019!https://www.altmetric.com/blog/where-to-meet-us-during-the-first-6-months-of-2019/
https://www.altmetric.com/blog/where-to-meet-us-during-the-first-6-months-of-2019/#respondThu, 10 Jan 2019 11:50:47 +0000http://www.altmetric.com/?p=17415The Altmetric team’s diary is already full of exciting conferences, events and workshops across the globe where we’ll be talking to our users and spreading the word about our latest product developments, partnerships and integrations. If you’re planning to attend any of the following events please don’t hesitate to chat to one of our team and ask them about the projects we’re working on.

Mike Taylor will be presenting on ‘The value of open metrics: a commercial perspective’ at the Lis Bibliometrics Forum at the British Library in January. Please get in touch with Mike if you would like to set up a meeting during the conference.

Mike Taylor will be attending and presenting a session on ‘Understanding and Tracking the Broader Impacts of Humanities with Altmetrics’ at the NFAIS Humanities Roundtable one-day event on 10th March in Washington, DC. Please get in touch with Mike if you would like to set up a meeting during the event.

EARMA 2019 26th – 29th March, Bologna, Italy

Ben McLeish will be presenting a session on ‘Measuring Knowledge mobilization for grant-funded research using bibliometrics, patent and policy indicators’ at the EARMA 2019 conference on the 29th March at 3.45pm-4.45pm. Please get in touch with Ben to set up a meeting during the conference.

Lunch & Learn: Supporting research evaluation metrics for the humanities and social sciences, 26th March, webinar

Stacy Konkiel will be presenting about ‘Supporting ‘humane’ research evaluation metrics for the humanities and social sciences: what role can content providers play?’ at the NFAIS Lunch and Learn webinar session on the 26th March.

Theta 2019, 19th – 22nd May, Wollongong, Australia

SSP 41st Annual Meeting, 29th – 31st May, San Diego, California

The Digital Science Publisher sales team will be attending this year’s SSP 41st Annual Meeting from the 29h -31st May in San Diego, California. Please email the Publisher sales team directly to schedule in a meeting to chat about Altmetric tools and data during the conference.

AUPresses 2019, 11th – 13th June, Detroit, Michigan

Stacy Konkiel and Cathy Holland will be attending the AUPresses Annual Meeting in Detroit, Michigan from the 11th – 13th June. Stacy will also be speaking on a panel session during the conference. Please email Stacy or Cathyif you are interested in scheduling in a meeting with them during the conference.

Further information and updates on events we’ll be going to can be found on the events page on our website.

We look forward to seeing you soon!

]]>https://www.altmetric.com/blog/where-to-meet-us-during-the-first-6-months-of-2019/feed/0Altmetric-supported research: 2018 in reviewhttps://www.altmetric.com/blog/altmetric-supported-research-2018-in-review/
https://www.altmetric.com/blog/altmetric-supported-research-2018-in-review/#respondThu, 20 Dec 2018 11:48:28 +0000http://www.altmetric.com/?p=17343In this post, Stacy Konkiel, Director of Research Relations at Altmetric, gathers and categorizes the altmetrics related research that published this year.

In 2018, the amount of Altmetric-related research that we’re aware of tripled. Typically, this research is quantitative in nature and offers new insights about the way research is communicated.

Here, I’ve collected and categorized all 80+ known articles, preprints and conference proceedings published in 2018 that analyze Altmetric data.

We’re proud to continue to support scientometrics researchers worldwide by offering access to our data, free of charge–something we’ve done since Altmetric was founded in 2011.

If you’re interested in gaining free access to Altmetric’s data for use in your own noncommercial research, check out our Research Data Access Program.

Structures of science

These studies investigate how certain kinds of research (e.g. preprints vs articles) are communicated and shared online, and the relationship of altmetrics to other indicators.

Open Access

Though citation advantages for open access research have been widely studied, the relationship between open access and altmetrics is less understood. These studies offer insight into a burgeoning topic of analysis.

It’s a very special time of year for us at Altmetric. For the 6th year in a row, we are releasing our annual Altmetric Top 100, a list that highlights research from the past year that has garnered significant international online attention and discussion.

Many of this year’s most important issues feature in this year’s Top 100, from the shocking mortality rates in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria to the spread of misinformation online, from the environmental consequences of climate change to links between food and health outcomes.

The Altmetric Top 100 typically features research from a variety of disciplines, written by authors from all corners of the globe, and this year is no different.

Research related to Medical & Health Sciences once again appeared most often in the Top 100.

The United States is the country with the most research in the Top 100 this year.

Other insights can be gleaned from the data, as well. This year’s list features papers published in 45 different journals, with the journal Science appearing more than any other single title (12 times).

Authors from theUniversity of Cambridge appeared more than any other institution (10 papers). Other institutions that feature strongly in the list include Harvard University (9) and University of Oxford (8); non-university organizations include the United States National Institute on Aging (3) and Hennepin Healthcare (3).

]]>https://www.altmetric.com/blog/2018-altmetric-top-100-is-here/feed/0The Top 20 books of 2018https://www.altmetric.com/blog/the-top-20-books-of-2018/
https://www.altmetric.com/blog/the-top-20-books-of-2018/#respondWed, 05 Dec 2018 07:24:11 +0000http://www.altmetric.com/?p=17193Next week, Altmetric will release the list of the Top 100 most popular articles of 2018. As we learned in last week’s blog post, the annual Top 100 list has seen many interesting topics and trends in the last five years.

Though the Altmetric Top 100 includes only articles, Altmetric has also tracked the online attention surrounding scholarly books since 2016. In this post, we’ll supplement the 2018 Top 100 by having an additional look at trends for the Top 20 books that received the most online attention this year:

(Side note: Altmetric’s tracking of books is a little different to that of articles – at the moment it covers books from over 50 publishers, and any mentions to titles listed on Google Books and Amazon. That means a lot of scholarly books, but of course not all, so bear that in mind when reading our summary below!).

Immediately obvious in this list is a dominant theme of politics and polarization. Many of the Top 20 books are about current US and UK politics, including Brexit and President Trump.

Remarkable in the Top 20 books list is how different the overall subject areas are from the typical Top 100 articles list. The Top 20 books are mostly related to “Studies in human society” (17 of 20), whereas the most popular subject for Top 100 articles, “Medical & health sciences”, appears only twice in the Top 20 books list. It’s worth pointing out that there are several non-scholarly trade titles that appear in this list, which may contribute to the subject area differences between the two lists.

Most of the Top 20 books were published by organizations such as Rand Corporation, World Bank, and National Academies Press*. This differs from the typical Top 100 articles lists, which are most often published by academic publishers such as SpringerNature and AAAS. The exception here is the National Academies of Sciences, which has published many of the Top 20 books of 2018 (through NAP), as well as many Top 100 articles to date (in the PNAS journal).

Twelve of the Top 20 books are Open Access–a trend that also diverges from the typical Top 100 list, which usually only contains 30-40% OA research.

The Top 20 books were most mentioned on Twitter (50,074 tweets total, median of 2099.5 tweets per book) and in the news (1087 mentions, median of 15.5 news mentions per book). The Top 20 books were surprisingly not mentioned at all on Reddit, nor in patents or peer reviews.

That’s it for now! While you wait for the Top 100 to drop next week, have a closer look at the books that most caught the public’s attention this year.

* It’s worth noting that many of the Top 20 books of 2018 are actually works that could arguably be better classified as gray literature. However, as they have similar characteristics as books in terms of length, and structure, Altmetric tracks and reports them in the same category as scholarly books.

Since December 2013 we’ve tracked, collated, blogged and podcasted about the most talked about papers that have been published each year, giving a rundown of which topics caught the public’s imagination. In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the insights and trends we’ve seen in Top 100 lists from 2013 to 2017, ahead of the release of the 2018 Top 100 next month.

Authors from the US and UK are leading the list

The majority of research included in Top 100 lists to date has been authored by researchers from US and UK institutions. This trend is reflected in where in the world the mentions for these research articles come from, as you can see in the table below. It should, of course, be noted that this is partly due to the underlying data available from the sources that Altmetric tracks across the globe, and also due to the high volume of mentions from western social media sources.

Table: Countries with most online mentions by source

Twitter

Facebook

News mentions

Policy documents

1

USA

USA

USA

USA

2

UK

UK

UK

Switzerland

3

Japan

Canada

Australia

Australia

4

Spain

Australia

Canada

Italy

5

Canada

Italy

India

UK

Nature and Science contributing most articles

We also took a look at which journals featured most prominently in the Top 100 over the years. Nature took the top spot for the number of articles featured overall in the last five years of Top 100, with a whopping 72 papers! Science comes in second with a total of 50 articles, and next is PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) with 36 articles.

Is Top 100 research becoming more ‘open’ over time?

Many of us at Altmetric thought that the number of titles published open access would increase steadily over time, reflecting the increasing shift to OA publishing seen across the scholarly space. From what we have seen (and it’s sometimes a little tricky to tell when trying to identify OA versus ‘free to read’ on a publisher site) there has been no significant increase, with around 30 – 40 open access articles featuring in each year’s list.

The number ones: where are they now?

As we come up to the sixth year of the Top 100, we thought we’d look back at the previous five year’s number one papers to see what type of attention they’ve received since hitting the top spot. Are their findings still relevant and much referenced, or have they since been disproved or debunked?

Exploring the theory that emotions can be transferred through social networks, this paper has received online attention for a variety of online sources since its publication, including two policy document references and over two hundred Reddit threads. Even today, the article continues to garner attention and was recently mentioned in a blog post discussing why we find it so fun to be frightened.

2015’s number one article received twelve positive reviews on F1000 within a year of publication from researchers praising the discovery of a highly effective new antibiotic. The research has also been referenced in three policy documents, most recently in September 2018 by the Analysis & Policy Observatory in their publication that looks ahead at the potential impacts of synthetic biology over the next twelve years.

This paper, written by none other than the 44th President of the USA, Barack Obama, continues to be the most mentioned piece of research we’ve ever tracked! The subject of the paper is the President’s Affordable Care Act, has been mentioned in news articles as recently as September this year as well as blogs and Reddit threads discussing how amazing it was that an American president wrote a journal article.

Having been published in November 2017 this paper received a huge amount of online attention immediately after publication, enough to take it to the number one Top 100 spot within a month. More recently the paper has been featured in stories in The Guardian and The New York Times blog.

Unexpected science

In each year’s list, there are usually papers that have unexpected authors, are about noticeable topics or that just simply stand out from the crowd:

This year’s Top 100 list is just around the corner and promises to be another year of amazing discoveries, insights and breakthroughs. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Instagram and search #altmetrictop100 to stay up to date with Top 100 announcements.

]]>https://www.altmetric.com/blog/the-altmetric-top-100-five-years-of-insights/feed/0#TheTweetingBird: the rise and impact of social media in ornithology (Part 2 of 2)https://www.altmetric.com/blog/thetweetingbird-the-rise-and-impact-of-social-media-in-ornithology-part-2-of-2/
https://www.altmetric.com/blog/thetweetingbird-the-rise-and-impact-of-social-media-in-ornithology-part-2-of-2/#respondThu, 15 Nov 2018 14:48:06 +0000http://www.altmetric.com/?p=17081In this second part of the two-part guest post by Steve Dudley, Chief Operations Officer of the British Ornithologists Union (BOU), he discusses how individuals and society publishers can use online channels to enhance their research communications.

Part 2: Using social media to promote your research articles

The BOU – 160 years old, digital, dynamic and social

The BOU is 160 years old. Like many, particularly older, societies, adapting to the fast-changing worlds of science, journal publishing and society as a whole, is both daunting and difficult.

The BOU is a small learned society with around 1,250 members globally publishing a single journal, IBIS, with an impact factor of 2.297 (2016) and ranked 2/24 in ornithology. Our actual society size belies the size of our global ornithology community as seen by our social media presence (Fig. 3).

Figure 3. The BOU’s social media use – year joined and number of followers. Twitter is the largest contributor to ornithology articles’ altmetrics, Facebook a minor contributor; Instagram and Weibo do not count towards altmetrics.

Like many small societies, our resources are very limited and come largely from our small membership and income from our journal. We are therefore very careful about where and on what we spend these finite resources.

The digital age has allowed societies to reduce some costs with better use of online communication. Even so, for small societies, this has not been as marked as people think with the main saving being the switch from costly printed postal communication to members, to digital delivery. Social media, however, enables us to widen communication at the society level as well as broaden the promotion of ornithology as a whole to a larger audience than we were previously able.

The BOU has continued to grow its online presence including across social media (Fig. 3). We use social media and other tools to not only promote ornithology to the widest possible audience but to promote ourselves as an active and dynamic society and to drive people to our website. Social media is key to this and now accounts for >20% of our overall society website traffic (<5% in 2013). We’ve similarly grown traffic to our journal (IBIS) website, and at the end of 2016 social media accounted for 7.5% of traffic (1.5% in 2013).

More recently we combined our social media skills and our experience of running conferences to run our first Twitter conference. Our largest two-day face-to-face event had around 60 presenters and 200 delegates. Our recent two-day Twitter conference had 67 presenters and an audience of over 3,000 people with a potential reach of 4.5 million. Twitter conferences deliver other benefits too – they are more inclusive and diverse allowing people from all around the world to take part, people who would otherwise not be able to attend a face-to-face event; and with all the presenters and audience taking part from wherever they were at the time, Twitter conferences are also very environmentally friendly!

I think there are fewer more important roles a society can have than to educate its research community about changes in their field, including areas such as communicating their own science for themselves. Most scientists that have not yet taken to social media are either skeptical or ask why have they not joined in the conversation earlier. One test I use is to ask someone how many profile views they get on sites like ResearchGate, or their online department profile. It’s usually in the tens at best for the last month. My Twitter profile views average around 2,500 a month!

Over the last five years, the BOU has managed to combine new technologies and media with traditional society activities and should act as an example of how a small society can adapt and prosper in the new digital and social age. Don’t be afraid!

Communicating science

Study’s such as our own (Finch et al 2017) are contributing to a growing body of evidence in a language that scientists themselves can understand. The benefits of communicating science on social media are becoming increasingly clear at the individual researcher, community society, journal publisher and, wider societal levels.

Funding bodies are also paying increased attention to science communication, in particular, altmetrics, as this provides them with a ready-made indicator of the attention a piece of published research has attained. As this new metric matures and becomes both better understood and trusted, it will provide funders with evidence of which of their spending reached a wider audience. This may be a crude way of viewing science funding, but since much of the money scientists spend comes from the taxpayer, it’s a measure funders can use themselves to better explain their funding practices.

Science communication isn’t for everyone. I’ve long said that some scientists shouldn’t go near it – they simply aren’t good at communication. That’s fine. I’m not much cop at many things either, and I leave them to others (like the analysis for our paper). But that should only serve to encourage researchers to broaden their search for collaborators that can bring in different skills to their research or paper, including individuals in their field who are good at communication and in particular, know how to get the best out of social media to promote their research.

Promoting your own science

Given the academic, community and wider societal benefits of promoting your research can have, there are several ways in which an individual can publicize their work online. Twitter is the most important being the largest contributor to ornithology altmetrics, and arguably being the easiest way to share links to published articles online.

Things you can do to promote your own research:

Tweet – the single biggest impact you can make the online attention of your research

Post on Facebook

Blog about your research

Add references to your published research on Wikipedia

All of these easy to do activities are covered in more detail in our paper, and in my series of blogs.

With all the energy and time that you put into your research, publicizing and promoting your published ornithology article should be viewed as equally important with benefits to the individual, science community and wider society through outreach, education and conservation.

BOU’s online resource (further reading)

We educate our ornithology research community using our blog (#theBOUblog). I have penned a series of articles highlighting the benefits of using social media to promote research, and how best to do it (e.g. which platform to use, Twitter masterclass series).

About the author: Steve has spent much of his 30-year career communicating science at different levels. He has run the British Ornithologists’ Union (BOU) for over 20 years and is responsible for delivering most of the society’s activities including all social media and communications. His recent focus has been on peer-to-peer communication, educating his research community about the benefits of using media and in particular about altmetrics.

]]>https://www.altmetric.com/blog/thetweetingbird-the-rise-and-impact-of-social-media-in-ornithology-part-2-of-2/feed/0#TheTweetingBird: the rise and impact of social media in ornithology (Part 1 of 2)https://www.altmetric.com/blog/thetweetingbird-the-rise-and-impact-of-social-media-in-ornithology-part-1-of-2/
https://www.altmetric.com/blog/thetweetingbird-the-rise-and-impact-of-social-media-in-ornithology-part-1-of-2/#respondWed, 14 Nov 2018 17:06:32 +0000http://www.altmetric.com/?p=17074In this first of a two-part guest blog post, Steve Dudley, Chief Operations Officer of the British Ornithologists Union (BOU) summarises the results from his recently published article in ISMTE looking at the positive effects of promoting research on Twitter.

The second part of this blog post will be published tomorrow (November 15th).

Part 1: social media mentions deliver citations of research articles

When you publish your research you look for impact. Impact comes in different forms, but most publishing academics strive for their work to be cited providing them with some level of merit from their peers within their research community.

Since 2014 a new measure of impact has been around – altmetrics – which measures not the scientific quality of the research article, but an article’s online attention by way of tracking mentions in news media, on blogs, across (some) social media platforms and a variety of other online sources.

In some sectors, scientists have been very slow adopters of social media. That isn’t true for ecology, and in particular, ornithology (avian science), and, rather appropriately, ornithologists have taken to Twitter (tweet-tweet) like ducks to water to promote their research. So it isn’t particularly surprising that some of the more meaningful early studies connecting the online attention of research articles to citations have come from these areas.

Peoples et al(2016) found that Twitter can predict the citation rate of ecology articles, and our own recent study (Finch et al 2017) used Altmetric data to show that not only did online mentions predict future citations in ornithology, but that Twitter contributed 75% of all the altmetrics of ornithology articles.

Figure 1. Twitter is by far the largest contributor to ornithology articles’ altmetrics. From Finch, O’Hanlon & Dudley (2017) http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.171371

More recently, and more broadly, Ortega(2017) showed that papers in journals with their own Twitter accounts are tweeted up to 46% more than papers in journals without a Twitter account, and this activity translated in up to a 34% increase in citations of a journal’s own articles.

So the question I am frequently asked by non-ornithologists is, how did the (to many, obscure) field of ornithology achieve this?

Ornithology in the social age

Ornithology has an established and mature community on social media thanks largely to several key, early adopting, stakeholders including my own society, the British Ornithologists’ Union (BOU). We took to Twitter and Facebook in 2011 to promote not only articles from our own journal (Ibis), but all ornithology articles. Our rise on these two platforms has been steady and on Twitter we now have over 13,500 followers (by far the largest journal/society account in ornithology) and we tweet around 20 times a day, mostly about new avian research articles. Many other ornithology journals and societies are now on Twitter, but the BOU is the only account that genuinely promotes all ornithology, tweeting and posting about any articles from any journal (even our fiercest rivals) for as a community society we see way beyond our own society’s needs. We are there to serve our community as broadly as we can.

Twitter has fast become the platform of choice for ornithologists. Most of the content remains science-focused, with relatively little chat. Twitter also uses a hashtag system: hashtags collate all mentions of a particular tag which can be saved by the user for quick access to all tweets on that tagged topic. These tags have also led to the establishment of community tags providing groups with distinctive identities. In 2012 the BOU promoted the #ornithology hashtag to promote all aspects of ornithological research on Twitter. The tag quickly became established and is a key driver for our community. From tracking the use and reach of the tag we know it has grown from around 150,000 impressions a day in 2014, to c.1.5 million impressions a day at the end of 2017.

The third factor contributing to ornithology’s perfect Twitter storm is education. From the onset, the BOU adopted the role of community educator on all things social media, and latterly altmetrics. We have a masterclass blog series which informs about Twitter best practices, the benefits of promoting your own research, which platforms to use, and the role of altmetrics and how researchers can track the attention of their own research articles.

So ornithology researchers taking up social media in recent years have found a ready-made community to hook up with, and audience to tap in to.

Online mentions and citations

Understanding that in ornithology we have a well-established and mature community on Twitter, we wanted to explore whether Twitter activity around published ornithological research was measurable, and whether or not online activity translated into citations of the research articles being promoted.

We looked at the Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) of over 6,000 research articles published in 10 ornithology journals between 2012 and 2016. Even over this relatively short period the AAS of articles have increased, which might be expected given the increased use of social media during the same five-year period. An important finding was that Twitter was by far the most important contributor (75%) to the overall AAS of ornithology articles followed by news media (13%), blogging (8%) and Facebook (2%) (Fig. 1).

We then looked at a subset of these ornithology articles, plus articles published in broader ecology journals, published in 2014 and cited in 2015 and 2016. Here we found a positive correlation between online mentions (measured by AAS) and the number of future citations. This relationship was strongest for articles published in journals with a lower impact factor (Fig. 2). Articles published in higher impact factor journals appeared to be higher cited regardless of online activity.

Figure 2. The association between AAS, journal impact factor and the probability of being cited. Articles promoted on social media from lower impact factor journals show the greatest increase in the probability of being cited. From Finch, O’Hanlon & Dudley (2017) http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.171371

We can’t establish whether articles which received more online mentions were cited more due to this increased attention, or whether more ‘citable’ articles get more online mentions because of their higher quality/relevance. However, either way, it appears that AAS can provide a more immediate measure of articles future scholarly impact in ornithology.

In part 2 I’ll discuss how both individuals and society publishers can better promote their own research articles.

About the author: Steve has spent much of his 30-year career communicating science at different levels. He has run the British Ornithologists’ Union (BOU) for over 20 years, and is responsible for delivering most of the society’s activities including all social media and communications. His recent focus has been on peer-to-peer communication, educating his research community about the benefits of using media and in particular about altmetrics.

]]>https://www.altmetric.com/blog/thetweetingbird-the-rise-and-impact-of-social-media-in-ornithology-part-1-of-2/feed/0October High Five – Just google it!https://www.altmetric.com/blog/october-high-five-just-google-it/
https://www.altmetric.com/blog/october-high-five-just-google-it/#respondMon, 12 Nov 2018 13:46:31 +0000http://www.altmetric.com/?p=17050Welcome to the October High Five! On a monthly basis, the High Five post highlights the articles that have received the most attention from a particular attention source type – whether it’s blogs, policy documents, Twitter, Wikipedia, or something else!

As Google+ will be shut down by Google soon, we thought we’d take the opportunity to highlight some of the research published in October that was mentioned by Google+ users.

‘The internal magnetic field is a diagnostic of interior structure, dynamics, and evolution of the host planet. Rotating convective motion in the highly electrically conducting layer of the planet is thought to maintain the magnetic field through the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) dynamo process.’ Dougherty, M.K. et al “Saturn’s magnetic field revealed by the Cassini Grand Finale” (2018) Science

The article has already been mentioned in 18 Google+ posts by users excited to share the new discoveries:

#4 Alternative motives to agriculture research

Image Credit: Wobogre under CC0

In at number four is “Agricultural research, or a new bioweapon system?” published in Science. The article looks at the disastrous effects of the creation and use of agricultural generic technologies that are designed to edit crop chromosomes in fields.

]]>https://www.altmetric.com/blog/october-high-five-just-google-it/feed/0What type of Altmetric user are you?https://www.altmetric.com/blog/what-type-of-altmetric-user-are-you/
https://www.altmetric.com/blog/what-type-of-altmetric-user-are-you/#respondTue, 30 Oct 2018 10:03:08 +0000http://www.altmetric.com/?p=16977Researchers! Are you a Wikipedia wizard, a social media and blog post seeker or a patent mention master?

Take our quiz to find out what type of Altmetric attention you most like to receive for your research and enter our competition to win a £20 Amazon gift card!

The quiz should only take a couple of minutes to complete. To enter our competition to win an Amazon gift card, simply tweet your result using #AltmetricResearcherQuiz by the 6th November.

When you complete the quiz, you’ll also receive a link to one of our helpful guides which we think you’ll find really useful.